Chris Fry collected wood for a long time in hopes of making a guitar, he said Saturday at the New Orleans Jazz Fest. However, his plans went awry when his luthier friend, who was going to instruct him on how to achieve such an endeavor, moved away. Then Fry's wife, Cheri, who collected wooden cooking spoons, asked him to make her one.

Judy Walker/The Times-PicayuneChris Fry's spoons are little works of art in wood, and he makes every one by hand.

"I say my first spoon took two weeks and a box of Band-Aids," said Fry, who is selling his Spoon Mill wooden spoons in the Louisiana Marketplace Heritage the first weekend. They are little works of art in wood, and he makes every one by hand.

"I just bought a lathe, but I haven't turned it on yet," he said.

Cheri sells the spoons by talking about all the things one can do with them in the kitchen, and it's apparent she is quite the cook. This is the first time she has brought recipes to hand out to customers: Mom's Grillades, Cheri's Debris Grits, Chicken Fricassee and more, including roux.

"People don't know how to make a roux," she and Chris agree. And they have found that Jazz Fest customers who hail from California are not interested in talking about dishes to cook with sausage.

Based these days in Denham Springs, the couple are no strangers to New Orleans. They sold their spoons at Palmer Park for more than a year, until a family illness. They do shows in the region, and this is their first time at Jazz Fest.

Their relatives are from here: "My dad was a star quarterback at Warren Easton High School," Chris says. Cheri learned to cook from her mother, who was a great New Orleans cook. Back in the day, Chris and his buddies would crash at his grandmothers' house on Pitt Street to come to the festival.

That was years ago. He became a furniture rep, then managed construction crews. For the last 10 years, he has been able to just make spoons.

He loves the wood, and will use anything "if it's good wood." He doesn't use cypress because it doesn't hold up. He demonstrates a big chinois pestle ("or good for house-to-house jousting. Or vampires"), which a customer at Palmer Park asked him to make. The wood is something "the Mississippi River coughed up."

He holds out a spoon made of "the world's rarest wood," pink ivory from Africa. "It's about $200 a board, and the only way to get it is if the tree is dying or loses a branch ... If someone is going to spend $268 on this spoon, I want them to bond with it a long, long time."

Most of his work is not near that expensive. Spreaders and small cheese knives start at around $14. Bigger spoons with a barley twist handle, surprisingly ergonomic, are in the $35-$50 range, depending on the wood and how elaborate they are.

New since the Palmer Park days: Small cutting boards, perfect to cut a lime on a bar or for serving a wheel of Brie.

"I had people wanting pizza peels (to transfer dough)," Fry said. "I'd have to filet this beautiful piece of wood" to make it thin at the top edge and thick enough at the other end of a handle. Cheri suggested he turn the stack of flat pieces into mini cutting boards. Now he sells many more of them than pizza peels.

"Backpackers want them, and they'll weigh it to get the lightest one," Fry said. "It's a hoot."